Could using Deku be an alternative for companies that would otherwise run a private version of the Tezos blockchain?
Obviously running a completely private chain deprives organizations of potential immutability benefits, and it could be argued that using a regular relational database or document store would be lower cost and more performant.
But can Deku be an alternative for organizations which want more control, but still want to take advantage of the immutability benefits of the public layer 1 chain?
Sidechains like Deku can cover this use case. However, a private sidechain might not make sense in every context.
One use case for a private sidechain could be if a consortium of businesses want consensus on data in real time (e.g. bills of lading in the logistics industry for example), and want reduce the trust needed in any one member. The blockchain would guarantee data integrity in the case of an audit or dispute, and the sidechain bridge would allow interop with the L1.
However, if a single entity wants to maintain an auditable record, there are likely better ways. For example, they could post a merkle root hash of their data to the L1 every few blocks, and then prove to auditors the integrity of their data without revealing everything publicly. You can do this for your own personal documents today with TzStamp: https://tzstamp.io/ - it’s easy to imagine scaling this up for a private company.
